This invention relates to the playing video information on a portable, hand-held electronic device, and particularly to providing a user with a seamless return to the video playback after the user has stopped the video.
There are many portable electronic devices in use today, such as multi-media devices. Many of these devices are configured such that they can manage many different types of information, such as information personal contact information, e-mails, photos, songs, movie videos, TV shows, podcasts, etc. While these devices are capable of handling many different types of information and handling them correctly (e.g., the display of photos, playing back recorded video, playing audio tracks from songs, etc.), it is common for such devices to be single-task operated. In this manner, portable electronic media devices differ from computers, such as Apple Macintosh computers, which can perform numerous different functions simultaneously in different windows that are displayed to the user.
In connection with the fact that portable electronic media devices are configured to perform one task at a time for the user, portable electronic media devices can provide the user with access to a variety of different functions through a menu or series of menus. For example, a user might be playing back a movie and then decide to check e-mail, so the user exits the movie. However, the user then decides to continue playing the movie and attempts to return to where the user left off. Unfortunately, the user can often be left waiting for an agonizingly slow amount of time before the video playback program reloads and the movie returns to the frame or scene where playback had left off. For example, the time to reload and reconfigure can take up to 30 seconds under some circumstances, leaving a user very, very frustrated.
The user's experience with the device, therefore, is not a pleasant one. It is even more unpleasant if, for example, the user never intended to leave the movie, but instead merely touched the wrong input and exited the movie entirely by accident (imagine how the user might feel if watching an action/thriller and it's near the end of the movie when the exit button is accidentally touched).